Stirring struggle endures to this Day

"I'd rather not have this war going on, thanks very much" ... Alan Seymour yesterday. Photo: Annabel Moeller

Alan Seymour's once-banned play, The One Day of the Year, has been a blessing and a curse, writes Richard Jinman.

The playwright Alan Seymour has mixed feelings about The One Day of the Year. Naturally, he's proud of the enduring play he wrote in 1958 for an amateur playwriting competition. A play which contains the once-heretical perspective that Anzac Day - the proud emblem of Australia's military sacrifice - was founded on confused ideals and often degenerated into a squalid orgy of drunkenness and street brawls.

But more than 40 years after its first, controversial staging in Adelaide - it was banned by the Adelaide Festival in 1960, but put on by a defiant amateur theatre group - the play evokes uncertainty and even anxiety in the 75-year-old playwright.

Speaking outside the Wharf 1 theatre before a preview of the Sydney Theatre Company's new production starring Max Cullen, Ron Haddrick and Nathaniel Dean, Seymour expresses mild concerns about the likely response of the STC audience.

And then there's the timing issue. As the war in Iraq intensifies, a few commentators have been quick to point out the significance of staging the once-divisive play.

It's a coincidence, of course: the STC made its scheduling decisions months ago. But the mere suggestion that war has given the production added relevance or extra piquancy receives short shrift from its author. "It's [the war] bloody awful," says Seymour bluntly. "I'd rather not have this war going on, thanks very much."");document.write("

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And something else. The way The One Day of the Year has entrenched itself in Australian culture is gratifying, but frustrating too. Seymour left Australia in the early 1960s and worked as a television writer, producer and commissioning editor with the BBC, and as a theatre critic for The Observer newspaper in London. He returned to live in Sydney in 1995, only to discover he was still defined by his 40-year-old play.

"In some ways it has been a bit of an albatross," he says. "I've written 10 other plays, but none has received the recognition or made the impact of this one."

The One Day of the Year was inspired by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit lambasting Anzac Day. The article, says Seymour, was considerably more strident than the photo essay about drunken diggers concocted by the play's young characters: a university student, Hughie Cook, and his North Shore girlfriend Jan Castle.

Seymour saw the Honi Soit article as an emblem of a generational shift, the chasm between an older Australia that venerated the Anzacs and a younger voice disgusted by war and ready to question the past.

His own impressions of the commemoration were shaped in the 1950s when he ventured into Sydney on an Anzac Day morning from his home in the city's inner-west. He returned to a frightening scene - drunken men brawling and vomiting in the street.

This alcohol-fuelled debasement is represented in the play by the working-class father Alf Cook. Belligerent and resentful of foreigners and anyone with an education, Alf clings to Anzac Day like a drowning sailor clings to a life raft. Boozing is just part of a noble tradition.

"I'm a bloody Australian, mate, and it's because I'm a bloody Australian that I'm gettin' on the grog. It's Anzac Day this week, that's my day, that's the old digger's day."

Seymour, who was born in Fremantle, says Alf's salty language and prejudices were inspired by his late brother-in-law Alfred Chester Cruthers. It was Cruthers and Seymour's sister, May, who raised the playwright from the age of nine after his father was killed in an accident on Fremantle's wharves.

"He [Cruthers] had all the same qualities," says Seymour. "He resented his lack of education and he was quite nasty about anyone that had a better deal than him."

Years later, Cruthers wrote to Seymour after seeing The One Day of the Year and asked him if Alf was indeed based on himself. The playwright was unable to reply.

The play's perspective on Anzac Day earned it instant notoriety when it was unleashed on conservative, Menzies-era Australia. On the first night of the 1960 Adelaide production a policeman was stationed at the stage door. In 1961, at the first professional season in Sydney, a bomb scare during a dress rehearsal forced police to clear the theatre.

But notoriety fades. The play has endured because of its finely drawn portrait of a father-and-son relationship. Alf and Hughie are divided by Hughie's shifting world view, but united by deep family bonds. It's an immensely powerful struggle. As Seymour puts it: "The crux of the play is that Hughie is receiving an education of the mind, but he needs an emotional education; he needs to feel."

The director, David Berthold, who cast Cullen as Alf and Dean as Hughie in the STC revival, agrees.

"The play stands as not only a drama of ideas, but a great family drama," he says. "Like all great works, regardless of their cultural context, they stand in the end on their emotional resonance."